David Vann - A Mile Down - The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

The crew untied the lines on the tiller while I put the engines in gear. I did several tests at slow speed, and everything felt fine. We topped off the steering fluid to be safe, but the steering wasn’t slipping. It felt firm. So I bumped the engines back up, though not quite as fast as before, and changed our course for Casablanca. We needed to check the rudder and hull for damage before continuing on to the Canaries. It would be a delay of a day or two but hopefully not more.

Emi and Nick took their watch again, and the rest of us returned to bed, exhausted. I lay awake for a while wondering why I had chosen this kind of life, feeling afraid of the boat, afraid of the wind and sea, afraid of the licenses and permits I would have to apply for again in Mexico, afraid most of all of my bills and debts, especially after the damage Amber had done. If John’s loan didn’t come through immediately, I wouldn’t have enough money even for diesel, or to pay the crew when we arrived. This life I was leading now was in many ways completely irrational, which made it seem plausible that I was doing all of this for unconscious reasons, trying to relive my father’s life, for instance, or testing whether I’d kill myself as he had if things got bad enough. There had to be something going on that I wasn’t fully aware of, because this was crazy.

I fell asleep finally, and when I awoke, it was only a few hours later to a hideously loud bang beneath me and the same fullspeed spin.

On deck, the crew had already cut the engines and Matt was getting the emergency tiller. The wind and seas had come up even more, which was not good.

I went below and looked under the bed, surprised to find the ram still connected. Everything looked fine with the post and its fitting and the ram. “Tell them to turn the wheel all the way to port, then all the way to starboard,” I told Nancy, and when they did, I could see the rudder post turn just as it was supposed to, but we were still lurching in circles.

I went back on deck and tried the wheel myself. “We’ve lost our rudder,” I said. I couldn’t believe it had happened, but it had. If the steering gear works, but there’s no response, and there’s no sound of a loose rudder banging the underside of the hull, then there’s no rudder down there. Shaped like the tail of an airplane, with the one severed stainless steel post sticking out, it was flying down to the bottom of the ocean.

There was one ship near us on the radar. We could see its lights far off to port. I hailed on the VHF and said we were disabled and needing assistance.

“This is the Birgit Sabban . I am not able to give you a tow,” the very German voice of the captain came back. “I have limited maneuverability in these seas.”

“Please stand by on sixteen,” I told him, and I tried hailing the Moroccan Coast Guard and any other vessels in the area but received no response.

I put the engines in gear and tried steering with them on our previous heading, giving the starboard engine more thrust when I wanted to turn to port, and vice-versa. It worked a bit.

The crew were watching me. “That’s crazy,” Matt finally said. “You can’t keep going without a rudder.”

“We can steer with the engines,” I said.

“Maybe you can,” Nick said. “But not us.”

They were right, of course. It was crazy. I couldn’t steer all the way to Casablanca myself, without help. At slow speed, it would take more than a day to get there, maybe longer. And then, as I was thinking these things, distracted, the boat went into a spin.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense to try to steer without a rudder in seas.”

“Right-o, then,” Nick said in his fake British accent. “At least we’ve established that.”

Everyone grinned. I put the engines back in neutral, then left the helm for the Inmarsat-C station in the main salon. I sent a distress message saying we were disabled, without a rudder, and in need of assistance. Then I returned to the radio.

The German captain was planning to go into the port of Kinitra at daylight, in just an hour or so, to pick up cargo.

“I need you to stay here,” I said. “We need assistance. We can’t make way consistently in the same direction without our rudder.”

“I’ll be in radio contact,” he said. “I am proceeding now to Kinitra. I will continue to try to reach the Moroccan Coast Guard for you on short, medium, and high frequency radio.”

He was leaving us. “You’re required by international law to stay and provide assistance,” I said. “I have reported the name of your vessel, the Birgit Sabban , by Inmarsat-C, and I expect you to remain here.”

There was some delay after this. “Okay,” he finally said. “We will remain here with you until daylight and then attempt a tow.” I thanked him and we waited for daylight.

As we waited, however, the wind and seas kept increasing. The wind was over forty knots and the seas fifteen to eighteen feet. I was using the engines to try to keep our bow into the waves, but I also couldn’t stray too far from the German ship and I couldn’t keep us straight anyway. Every time we went broadside to the waves we rolled hideously. The waves were a bit too small to be able to capsize us by rolling us over, but it felt close.

The German captain raised the Moroccan Coast Guard on medium wave radio, but the Moroccans couldn’t send out any boats because of the rough weather. All they could offer was a helicopter with a diver, if we wanted to abandon ship. This option would be possible only during daylight.

“We need a tow,” I told the German captain. “We need a very long bridle with a shackle, and we need a tow line long enough that it will be submerged to absorb shock. We’re over a hundred tons.”

“Do you have this tow line?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Nothing long enough or heavy enough.”

“Well, I don’t have this equipment either.”

“You have long dock lines that are thick enough,” I said. “Give us one of those for a bridle, and a shackle if you have it, and then make several lines into a long towline to tie onto it.”

“We will see what we have,” he said.

Daylight was a dull metallic color in this weather. The German ship was green and 300 feet long. It made a slow circle and passed in front of us, into the wind and waves.

“I am limited in maneuverability,” the captain said. “I can only make a track into the wind and you will have to bring your bow up to my stern.”

“I have no rudder,” I said.

“This is all I can do, or I will not have control in these seas.”

So I used the engines to steer the boat. The wind and seas continued to build, the waves very sharp, becoming twenty-footers packed close together, driven by wind over fifty knots. I could get the boat moving several knots forward, catching up to the freighter, but then my bow would take three feet of solid water over the top and the boat would slew to the side from the impact. The wind would catch us as we came up high over the next twenty-foot wave and blow us into a spin. In the spin, another twenty-footer would catch us broadside and roll us more than fifty degrees, which meant looking down across 21.5 feet of deck more or less straight into the water. Fifty knots of wind has tremendous force. The engines were strong, and I was using all the power they had, but if the wind caught the boat right, there was no stopping the spin without a rudder.

An hour later, when I was finally in position behind the stern of the freighter, I tried to hide in its wind shadow, but it was weaving a bit. The German ship’s crew was on the stern, ready to throw small lines with monkey’s fists, a knot shaped like a ball. To get close enough for my crew to catch one of these, I would need to place our bowsprit within about twenty feet of the German ship, which was a fearsome sight. The stern of the freighter was fifty feet high and flared on the sides, so that when the stern came down after each wave, it flattened the seas with a loud crash and then a sucking sound as it rose up again. I had to use the engines to keep my bow straight behind the freighter’s stern, but I couldn’t drift forward any faster than the freighter was going.